Officially launched at NAMM - but I wanted to give you guys the full heads-up. This is a digital reverb mini-pedal, simple to use, but giving a whole load of new sounds. It's based around an FV-1 chip, and comes with an Igor expression pad for real-time control. 'Size' adjusts the length of the effect, and 'Level' the amount of it you hear (the original guitar signal is always present).

It has just two main flavours of reverb; bright and immediate, or dark and brooding with pre-delay (both 5 or 6 secs max). I'm just not into the endless types of reverb - I think how you process them is far more interesting...

DISTORTIONThe Reverb-X really comes into its own in how it can deal with the reverb. It's based on the excitement of plugging an overdrive pedal after a reverb pedal; it's 'wrong', but everything you play sounds huge and epic, exaggerated and full of texture and detail... Here, an overdrive circuit - after the reverb - can be blended in via the 'Distn' knob. Have it totally clean, a bit gritty, quite rough, or dial in a fully burnt-out glow.

At all times, however, the input signal is unaffected; if you already use an overdrive pedal, the Reverb-X can add a whole new dimension of distortion to your sound. If your input tone is clean however, it stays clean - no matter how much distorted reverb you add to it.

Usually though, in this situation when you stop playing, the hum from your cable alone would be as loud as the notes you were playing! So gotta have a noise gate involved...

NOISE GATEThis is always on, either before the reverb and distortion circuits, unobtrusively silencing hums and buzzes when you're not playing. Switch in the 'Gate' button though, and this changes to post reverb and distortion. It opens when you play, and closes hard when you stop, totally cutting off any reverb that's happening - giving an incredibly dramatic and original effect. Sure, it's a gated reverb, but play a long riff and gate stays open, giving the full reverberation as set by the 'Size' knob. Stop playing and the whole thing is shut down, giving a tight control over it - like a hard-edited 'sample'....

If you have the 'distn' knob off, it sounds like a clean new sample.At about 11 o'clock on that dial it's more like a 1980s one (a bit of grit from over-cooked digital reverb use!).At about 2 o'clock it's early 1970s, getting kind of rough...At fully clockwise it's 1950s - ambience getting pretty fuzzy!

I did consider labelling that dial 'Decade' with '80s, '70s etc marked on it!

The 'input' control and 'Overload' LED insure that the output is always as loud - and clean (if you want) - as possible. The 'Out' knob has plenty of spare output volume on tap. Adjusting the 'input' knob also effectively adjusts the threshold of the noise gate - the only way the gate can be tweaked.

IGORPlug in the Igor expression pad and you get no reverb at all. However as you start to lean on it the signal gets diverted to the waiting reverb pathway, and a bloom of reverberation grows behind whatever notes you're playing. Take your foot off of Igor and you go back to fully dry - but the reverb decays on its own.

Or have the 'Gate' switch in, and the added reverb is cut short, like some twisted dub-meister at the controls, messing with everyone's depth perception....

The Reverb-X does all the standard sort of reverb jobs - clean, short/long etc....Plus also does 'live bootleg' reverb, overloaded space-rock atmospherics, techno-y percussive reverbs. It's a modern take on 80s 'gated reverb'.

Every day about 6-ish comes the 'R-X hour', where I have to give it another spin for a while..... It's very distracting!